chapter one MINARET AND TOWER On the twenty-first of March 630, the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius entered Jerusalem by its Golden Gate at the head of his legions to set up the True Cross of Christ, which he had just recaptured from the Persians in one of his great Persian wars. Dressed in humble garb, he dismounted not far from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and went the rest of the way on foot. Thousands of weeping Christians, overcome with elation, parted before him and carpets scented with aromatic herbs were strewn across his path. "An indescribable joy," wrote one Byzantine court poet, "seized the entire Universe."1 It was "a triumphant event for all Christendom," and is still marked today in the Church calendar as the "Feast of the Elevation of the Cross."2 Yet even as it was taking place, in one of the strangest coincidences of history, word came that an imperial outpost beyond the Jordan River had just been assailed by a small Arab band. The emperor paid little heed. Within a few years, however, Palestine and many other provinces would be torn forever from Roman rule, the Persian Empire shattered, and a new faith and people would arise to control the world''s stage.
In 636, just six years after Heraclius shrugged off this first Arab attack, his own vast legions would be crushed by the forces of Omar, second caliph from the Prophet, on the banks of the Yarmuk River in Syria. Ever since that day, the forces of the Near and Middle East have had "a deep, silent disdain" for the thunderings of Christian power.3 THE RISE OF ISLAM IS OFTEN DEPICTED AS HAVING TAKEN place in a primitive community of desert Arabs, who tended their flocks when not raiding caravans or engaged in tribal feuds. After their conversion to Islam, these tribes banded together and, upon the death of their Prophet (so the story goes), folded up their tents and swarmed out of the desert to spread his new doctrine to the world. Almost overnight they began to demonstrate a marked degree of culture and became an invincible military machine. That strange picture, still popular in the West, is at once both too pathetic and high-flown. Islam had its cradle in an area where advanced civilizations-Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, and Byzantine-had thrived since ancient times. Arabia lay on their outskirts, but in succession or combination all had irrigated its psychic soil.
Cuneiform tablets record large Arab armies complete with infantry, cavalry, and chariots as early as 853 B.C. And the oral tradition of Arabic poetry is resplendent with heroic lays that tell of mighty battles, the dreams of love, and the oases of paradise. Empires rose and fell, and by the seventh century A.D., those large Arab armies and the kingdoms they served had long since dispersed. But the region remained in dynamic transition, where the vibrant streams of faith and culture converged. The Prophet Muhammad sprang from its soil.
Born ca. A.D. 570 at Mecca in Arabia on the shores of the Red Sea, Muhammad was the son of a merchant and belonged to the elite Arab tribe of the Koraish. Orphaned early, he was raised by in-laws, married a wealthy merchant''s widow (much older than himself), had four daughters and two sons, and embarked, in the footsteps of his father, on a business career. Despite his worldly interests, he was a religious man, spent whole nights in contemplation on Mount Hira near Mecca, and there one day in 620, it is said, the angel Gabriel appeared to him and urged him to preach among the Arabs on behalf of the one true God. Like other Arab prophets, he spoke in rhythmic prose, but his revelation was distinctly monotheistic, which set him apart. Most Arabs worshipped the forces of nature and at Mecca the central pagan cult revolved around a meteorite.
This was the famed Black Stone, built into a cube-shaped sanctuary called the Kaaba. Muhammad fulminated against polytheistic idolatry (the Kaaba contained at least 150 idols) and such barbarous practices as burying female children alive. Though he had no direct knowledge of the Hebrew or Christian scriptures, which had not yet been translated into Arabic (the only language he knew), he had many probing encounters with Jews and Christians, both on his caravan journeys and in Mecca; and his religious understanding was deeply swayed by the ideas he had acquired of these faiths. His grasp of their doctrine and tradition, however unclear, was earnest and he cast himself as a religious reformer entrusted by God to restore the ancient cult of Abraham, which he believed the Jews and Christians had betrayed. Muhammad, in fact, never claimed to be the founder of a new religion, but merely one whose unsought if sacred calling it was to warn his fellow man of the coming Judgment Day. He saw himself as the last of the prophets, the seal and keystone of those who had gone before. But the Meccan elite resented his attack on their beliefs and the implied threat it posed to the profits they derived from the annual pilgrimage (or Hajj) that Arabs made to the Kaaba. His teaching at first also aroused hostility and derision, from the community at large, which forced him to flee Mecca in 622 for the town of Medina to the north.
This became known as the year of the Hegira, or Flight. In the Muslim calendar, it marks the year One. Everything in the Muslim calendar dates from that time just as Christians date their calendar (backward and forward) from the presumed birth of Christ. In Mecca, Muhammad had been the despised preacher of a small congregation; in Medina, he became the leader of a powerful party, which formed the basis of his rise. He began to act as lawgiver for his small community of refugees, won new converts, expelled or killed those who reviled him, and established a theocratic city-state. Between 622 and 628 various clashes occurred between his followers and Meccans, but by 630 he gained the upper hand. Mecca was taken, and Arabs from as far away as Bahrain, Oman, and southern Arabia joined his ranks. Though Arab tribes had long been a volatile force in the region, Muhammad managed to forge them into a single confederation and persuade them to put aside their jealousies and feuds.
Their bond of union was not only Muhammad''s charisma, but Islam, their newfound faith. "Islam" means "surrender" or "resignation to the will of God." One who professes Islam is therefore a "Muslim," meaning "one who surrenders oneself." Islam''s simple creed is "There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet." The essence of its teaching is a belief in God ("Allah" in Arabic) and His Angels; in the Scripture or Koran (meaning "recitation") as revealed through Muhammad to mankind; and in a final Resurrection and Judgment of man according to his works on earth. Equally plain and direct are the obligations placed upon believers. They consist of almsgiving; prayer five times a day-at dawn, noon, midafternoon, sunset, and dusk-facing Mecca; the observance of the fast during the month of Ramadan, the ninth month of the Muslim year; and the Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca, which Islam appropriated from the pagan past. Muslims abstain from eating pork and drinking wine; regard marriage as a civil ceremony; and bury their dead.
Orthodox Muslims do not tolerate images of anything divine, and in the forms of their worship no priest or cleric stands between the soul and God. The mosque, where the faithful assemble for public devotions every Friday, is an open courtyard surrounded by colonnades and unadorned save for Koranic texts. It features a mihrab or niche showing the direction of Mecca, a pulpit, and a minaret where the muezzin (as he is called) utters the call to prayer. Although Muhammad, like Christ, never wrote anything, over time scattered transcriptions of his teachings were posthumously collated and compared with oral recollections. By a lengthy editorial process (not unlike that which attended the making of the New Testament), a canonical version of the Koran emerged. In time the sacred text was supplemented by a voluminous compendium of Muhammad''s reported pronouncements and deeds, known as the Traditions or Hadith. Hadiths, real or spurious, served as the Muslim Talmud and "furnished the community with apostolic precepts and examples covering the minutest detail of man''s proper conduct in life."4 They also provided an encyclopedic fund of anecdotes, parables, and sayings by which Muslims were edified.
Muhammad died in 632 while returning from a pilgrimage to Mecca and leadership at first passed by election to a series of caliphs, or "successors"-Abu Bakr, Omar, Othman, and Ali-who inherited his temporal but not theocratic crown. These first four caliphs, who ruled without founding dynasties, are sometimes known as the Orthodox caliphs, and it was under their aegis-and that of their invincible general Khalid ibn al-Walid ("the sword of Islam")-that the early conquests were made. Yet Islam had been a "church militant" from the start. Even under Muhammad (if not at his direction), Muslim bands had carried out raids along the borders of the Byzantine Empire. Within two years of his death, victories brought the Muslims into Chaldea (southern Iraq), gave them the city of Hira, and with the Battle of Yarmuk in 634, opened Syria to their arms. Damascus fell in 635; Antioch and Jerusalem in 636; and Caesarea in 638. Seleucia-Ctesiphon, the capital of Chaldea, was taken in 637; Mesopotamia subdued; the cities of Basra and Kufa founded; and part of Persia annexed in 638-40. Egypt, then mostly Christian, was conquered in 641.
The decisive Battle of Nahavand in 642 put an end to the Sassanid dynasty of Persia and placed all of Persia in Muslim hands. Circumstance favored their advance. The Byzantine and Pe.